Conventionally, an opening/closing apparatus with lock, enabling opening and closing movements of sliding doors and locking of the sliding doors in a fully closed position, mounted on a housing in a reciprocatingly movable manner, is known.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-121244 (the “Patent Literature 1”) discloses an opening/closing apparatus with lock with a simple and compact arrangement that enables secure locking of slide-apart type sliding doors and enables opening and closing and closed locking of the sliding doors with a single actuator.
The opening/closing apparatus with lock disclosed in the Patent Literature 1 includes: a rack and pinion mechanism, having a pair of racks, respectively mounted on a pair of slide-apart type sliding doors that are movable reciprocatingly with respect to a housing, and a pinion engaged with the pair of racks; an actuator, functioning as an opening/closing drive source of the sliding doors; a locking mechanism mounted on the housing and enabling to lock the pair of sliding doors in a fully closed position by constraining respective movements of locking members that are respectively fixed to the respective sliding doors of the pair of sliding doors; a switching mechanism for switching the locking mechanism between a locked state and an unlocked state; and a planetary gear mechanism, having an input portion, into which a drive force of the actuator is input, a first output portion, enabling to output the drive force to the pinion, and a second output portion, enabling to output the drive force to the switching mechanism; and when the sliding doors are in the fully closed position, the drive force is output from the second output portion to the switching mechanism.